Keele Research Repository

In January 1847, Branwell Brontë wrote a letter to his friend J. B. Leyland quoting from Lord Byron’s satirical epic Don Juan (1819–24). This was an unusual choice of allusion given that the topic is Byron’s feelings of longsuffering that Branwell usually related to other Byron works such as Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18) and Manfred (1817). This essay explores the reasons why the stanzas to which Branwell refers seemed a more appropriate literary touchstone at a point in his life when he was publicly suffering personal and professional embarrassment as he struggled to come to terms with romantic disappointment and his heavy drinking.